Although the relationship of handedness to the ability to talk has been known to the ancients (Psalm 137, for example) the exact knowledge of anatomical underpinnings of this relationship at the public level is a new understanding. This article pursues another corollary of the anatomy sustaining laterality of motor control, i.e. the variability of the alien/unruly hand in patients who have suff...

Asymmetry of the planum temporale in relation to handedness, gender, and dyslexia is reviewed. The frequency of rightward asymmetry is rather higher than are estimates of the proportion of right hemisphere speech representation in the general population. Conversely, the frequency of leftward asymmetry is lower than the proportion of the population with left hemisphere speech. Neuro-anatomic asy...

The left and right sides of the human brain are specialized for different kinds of information processing, and much of our cognition is lateralized to an extent toward one side or the other. Handedness is a reflection of nervous system lateralization. Roughly ten percent of people are mixed- or left-handed, and they show an elevated rate of reductions or reversals of some cerebral functional as...

A sample of 404 adult men underwent assessment following illegal or clinically significant sexual behaviors or interests. Patients' assessments included: administration of a modified version of the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory; recording of patients' phallometric (penile) responses to erotic stimuli depicting adults, pubescent children, and prepubescent children of both sexes; and a tabulatio...

The effect of handedness on cognitive functioning has been the subject of much controversy. The influential "pathological left-handedness theory" posited by Coren and Halpern (1991) claims that left-handedness is probabilistically related to deviations from the neurological and cognitive norm. Many studies have failed to find negative effects of left-handedness on cognitive functioning, but mos...

Whereas the relationship of handedness to the ability to talk has been known to the ancients (Psalm 137, for example) the exact knowledge of anatomical underpinnings of this relationship at the public level is a new understanding. This article pursues another corollary of the anatomy sustaining laterality of motor control, i.e. the variability of the alien/unruly hand in patients who have suffe...

Brain asymmetry is widespread, but the presence of handedness in non-human animals is debated. A new study now provides evidence for handedness in bipedal - but not quadrupedal - marsupials.

Since prehistoric times, left-handed individuals have been ubiquitous in human populations, exhibiting geographical frequency variations. Evolutionary explanations have been proposed for the persistence of the handedness polymorphism. Left-handedness could be favoured by negative frequency-dependent selection. Data have suggested that left-handedness, as the rare hand preference, could represen...

The relationship between handedness and attentional performance is poorly understood. Continuous performance tests (CPTs) using visual stimuli are commonly used to assess subjects suffering from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). However, auditory CPTs are considered more useful than visual ones to evaluate classroom attentional problems. A previous study reported that there was a...

Handedness is the single most studied aspect of human brain asymmetries. For long it has been thought to be a monogenic trait that can produce an asymmetrical shift of cerebral mechanisms, thereby producing right handedness. Nevertheless, a single gene explaining a sufficient amount of phenotypic variance has not been identified. The results of several recent studies using advanced molecular ge...